Kite-flying for the bankers and the 1%

I must commend Comment editor Becky Gardiner for enabling Melissa Kite to shine a light into the strange alternative reality inhabited by contemporary conservatives (Comment, 18 February). Kite's beyond-satire "save the 1%" plea for a more tolerant and compassionate attitude to bankers certainly added to the gaiety of countless Guardian-reading breakfast tables. Thanks to Melissa's wise words we arose from our Fairtrade muesli with a new-found sympathy for bankers' long daily commutes in from Hampstead and Chelsea to long hours of stressful toil (their armies of minimum-wage cleaners breezing in from Walthamstow and Newham should count their blessings), to say nothing of a new appreciation of the pro-social impulses behind bankers' insatiable appetite for acquiring prime London residential properties – by no means, it transpires, exacerbating the capital's acute housing crisis, but in fact a Keynesian job-creation scheme for gardeners and other domestic servants. Who knew? (Where was Melissa in 2010? She would have helped us comprehend that without the inward investment of expense-fiddling MPs the duck-house industry would be on its knees!)

More seriously, her characterisation of Ed Miliband's very tentatively social-democratic platform as "somewhat to the left of Hugo Chavez" confirms that in David Cameron's Conservative party, a frail veneer of urbane liberalism masks deep reservoirs of reaction, self-interest and rabid dogmatism. Kite is, of course, an intellectual featherweight, but her absurd and offensive vapourings nonetheless provide a salutary reminder, if any was needed, of just how hard Labour will have to fight to make its voice heard in the face of a relentlessly hostile rightwing media - and of how critical Labour victory next year will be to any hope of preserving sanity and decency in Britain. Professor Barry LangfordRoyal Holloway, University of London